THE INEXPLICABLE
HOPE OF MOTHERS by Adrienne Freeland
My maternal grandmother was born on January 2, 1925, 15 years and 9 months before the start of World War II. To me, as a child of the ’80s, World War II somehow feels like it was eons ago. Certainly too long ago that any of my immediate family members could have had memories of it. It’s hard to imagine how witnessing so much loss and fear impacted the way members of my grandparents’ generation lived and eventually the way they parented. In her youth my grandmother was tall, slender, and lovely, born into a wealthy family in the South. The 8
Aging Times Magazine | May 2021
world was wildly different than it is now. In her lifetime she witnessed unbelievable social and technological change. From world wars to civil rights movements, and from black and white television to the invention of the internet. In the 1950s after marrying my handsome grandfather, she began the next phase of her life: motherhood. Together they had three energetic and highly opinionated daughters whom she raised in a small home that my grandfather built. Like many families in those days, he worked out of the house making a good living, and she worked in the house and was responsible
